Free - Beyond Collapse

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Will Globalists Use North Korea To Trigger Catastrophe?

Guest Post By Brandon Smith

Whenever discussion over North Korea arises in Western circles, it
always seems to be accompanied by a strange mixture of sensationalism
and indifference. The mainstream media consistently presents the
communist nation as an immediate threat to U.S. national security,
conjuring an endless number of hypothetical scenarios as to how they
could join forces with Al-Qaeda and attack with a terroristic strategy.
At the same time, the chest puffing of the late Kim Jong-iL and the
standard fare of hyper-militant rhetoric on the part of the North Korean
government in general seem to have lulled the American public into a
trance of non-concern.

In the midst of the latest tensions with the North Koreans, I have
found that most people are barely tracking developments and that, when
confronted by the idea of war, they shrug it off as if it is a laughable
concept. “Surely” they claim, “The North is just posturing as they
always have.”
The high-focus propaganda attacking North Korea on our side and the
puffer fish methodology on their side have created a social and
political atmosphere surrounding our relations with the Asian nation
that I believe places both sides of the Pacific in great danger. North
Korea has the potential to become a trigger point for multiple economic
catastrophes, and there are people in this world who would be happy to
use such crises to serve their own interests.

The mainstream view being espoused by globalist-minded politicians
and corporate oligarchs with an agenda is that North Korea is a nuclear
armed monstrosity ready to use any subversive means necessary to strike
the United States. The idea that the North is working closely with
Al-Qaeda has been suggested in everything from White House briefings to
cable news to movies and television. The concept of pan-global terrorist
collusion and the cartoon-land “axis of evil” has been prominent in our
culture since the Administration of George W. Bush. It has even been
making a resurgence lately in the MSM, which presented countries like
Iran, Syria And North Korea as the primary culprits interfering with the
success of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty.

Of course, what remains less talked about in the mainstream is the
fact that these nations refuse to adhere to the treaty because carefully
placed loopholes still allow major powers like the United States to
feed arms into engineered insurgencies. Why would Syria or any other
targeted nation sign a treaty that restricts its own sovereign ability
to trade while giving teeth to internal enemies trained and funded by
foreign intelligence agencies?

The establishment brushes aside such facts and consistently
admonishes these countries as the last holdouts standing in the way of a
new world order, a worldwide socioeconomic cooperative and
pseudo-Utopia. The path to this wonderful global village is always
presented as a battle against stubborn isolationists, non-progressives
who lack vision and cling desperately to the archaic past. The values of
personal and national sovereignty are painted as outdated, decrepit and
even threatening to the newly born world structure. The image of North
Korea is used by globalists as a kind of straw man argument against
sovereignty. North Koreans’ vices and imbalances as a culture are many;
but this is due in far larger part to their communist insanity, rather
than any values of national independence. It is their domestic hive-mind
collectivism we should disdain, not their wish to maintain a
comfortable distance as a society from the global game.

As far as being an imminent physical threat to the United States, it
really depends on the scenario. The North Koreans have almost no
logistical capability to support an invasion of any kind. The nation has
been suffering from epidemic famine for well more than a decade.

To initiate a war outright has never been in the best interests of
the North Koreans, simply because their domestic infrastructure would
not be able to handle the strain. However, there is indeed a scenario in
which North Korea could be influenced to use military force despite
apprehension.

With the ever looming threat of famine comes the ever looming threat
of citizen revolution. When any government is faced with the
possibility of being supplanted, it will almost always lash out
viciously in order to maintain power and control, no matter the cost.
Sanctions like those being implemented by the West against North Korea
today, at the very edge of national famine, could destabilize the
country entirely. I believe the North would do anything to avoid an
internal insurgency scenario, including attacking South Korea to acquire
food stores and energy reserves, as well as other tangible modes of
wealth.

North Korea’s standing army, obtained through mandatory two year
conscription, is estimated at about 1.1 million active personnel; very
close to the numbers active in the U.S. armed forces. But North Korean
reserves are estimated at more than 8 million, compared to only 800,000
in the United States. If made desperate by economic sanctions, the
North Koreans could field a massive army that would wreak havoc in the
South and be very difficult to root out on their home turf. Asian
cultures have centuries of experience using asymmetric warfare (the
kryptonite of the U.S. military), and I do not believe it is wise to
take such a possible conflict lightly, as many Americans seem to do. It
is easy to forget that the last Korean War did not work out so well for
us. At best, we would be mired in on-ground operations for years (just
like Iraq and Afghanistan) or perhaps even decades. Like North Korea,
we also do not have the logistical economic means to enter into another such war.

The skeptics argue that we will never get to this point, though,
because North Korea has brandished and blustered many times before, all
resulting in nothing. I see recent events being far different and more
urgent than in the past, and here’s why:

1)The West needs to realize that North Korea is under new
leadership. The blowhard days of Kim Jung Il are over, and little is
known about his son, Kim Jong Un. So far, the young dictator has
followed through on everything he said he would do, including the
multiple nuclear tests that the West is using as an excuse to exert
sanctions. To assume that the son will be exactly like the father is
folly.

2)Many
people claimed that North Korean threats to abandon the Armistice in
place since 1953 were empty, yet they dropped it exactly as they said
they would at the beginning of March.

3)The
North has begun cutting off direct communication channels to the South,
including a cross-border hotline meant to help alleviate tensions
through diplomatic means.

4)The
North has officially declared a state of war against the South. This
has been called mere “tough talk” by the U.S. government, but the speed
at which these multiple developments have occurred should be taken into consideration.

5)North Korea has just announced the reopening of a shuttered nuclear reactor used to render weapons grade materials.

6)The DPRK has suddenly locked down the Kaesong Industrial Zone; a region which holds manufacturing centers for both North and South Korea.Southern manufacturers operating there employ nearly 50,000 Northern workers.Nearly 1000 Southerners also work there.The arrangement generates approximately $2 billion a year for the North.The
joint industrial zone has existed since 2000, and the North has never
locked down access until this past week. The fact that the DPRK is
willing to restrict this area and possibly lose a sizable income signals
that the situation is not as “mild” as some would like to believe.

7)At
the beginning of this year, silver purchases by the North from China
surged. For the entire year of 2012, the government purchased $77,000
worth of precious metals. In the first few months of 2013, North Korea
has already purchased $600,000 in silver. The exact size of the North’s
precious metals stockpile is unknown. Though seemingly small in
comparison to many purported metal holdings by major powers, this sudden
investment expansion would indicate a government move to protect
internal finances from an exceedingly frail economic environment.
Metals are also historically accumulated at a high rate by nations
preparing for war or invasion in the near term.

Again, all that is needed to instigate an event on the Korean
Peninsula are tightened sanctions. The establishment knows this, though
another Gulf of Tonkin incident (an openly admitted false flag event)
may be on the menu as well.

Given that the chances of a shooting war are high if sanctions
continue, it might be wise to consider the consequences of conflagration
in Korea.

Dealing with a large army steeped in asymmetric and mountain warfare
will be difficult enough. In fact, an invasion of North Korea would be
far more deadly than Afghanistan, if only because of the sheer number
of maneuver elements (guerilla-style units) on the ground. But let’s set
aside North Korea for a moment and consider the greatest threat of
all: dollar collapse.

As I have discussed in numerous articles, China, the largest foreign
holder of U.S. debt, has positioned itself to decouple from the American
consumer and the dollar. This is no longer a theoretical process as it
was in 2008, but a very real and nearly completed one. Mainstream
analysts often claim China would never break from the dollar because it
would damage their export markets and their investment holdings. The
problem is, China is already dumping the dollar using bilateral trade agreements with numerous developing nations, Australia being the latest to abandon the greenback.

China isn’t just talking about it; China is doing it.

The development of a decoupled China is part of a larger push by
international banks to remove the dollar as the world reserve currency
and replace it with a new global currency. This currency already exists.
The International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) is a
mechanism backed by a basket of currencies as well as gold. The
introduction of the SDR on a wide scale is dependent on only two things:
First, China has been designated the replacement consumer engine in
the wake of a U.S. collapse. They have already surpassed the United
States as the No. 1 trading power in the world. However, they must
spread their own currency, the Yuan, throughout global markets in order
to aid the IMF in removing the dollar. China has recently announced a
program to sell more than $6 trillion in Yuan denominated bonds to
foreign investors, easily fulfilling this need.

Second, China and the IMF need a scapegoat event, a rationale for
dumping the dollar that the masses would accept as logical. A U.S.
invasion of North Korea could easily offer that rationale.

While China has been playing the good Samaritan in relations with the
United States in dealing with North Korea and has supported (at least
on paper) certain measures including sanctions, China will never be in
support of Western combat actions in the Pacific so close to their
territory. The kind of U.S. or NATO presence a war with North Korea
would generate would be entirely unacceptable to the Chinese, who do not
need to respond using arms. Rather, all they have to do to get rid of
us would be to fully dump the dollar and threaten to cut off trade
relations with any other country that won’t do the same. The domino
effect would be devastating, causing U.S. costs to skyrocket and forcing
us to pull troops out of the region. At the same time, the dollar would
be labeled a “casualty of war” rather than a casualty of conspiratorial
global banking designs, and the financial elites would be removed from
blame.

Ultimately, we should take the North Korean situation seriously not
because of the wild-eyed propaganda of the mainstream media and not
because they are “doing business with terrorists” or because they are a
“violent and barbaric relic of nationalism,” but because a war in North
Korea serves the more malicious interests of globalization. No matter
what happens in the near future, it is important for Americans to always
question the true motives behind any event and ask ourselves who, in
the end, truly benefited.

You can contact Brandon Smith at:
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